Not far from the Pacific Ocean, where just to the south, oil platforms dot the horizon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted into space Monday with dozens of satellites on board.
Four miles away from the launch site, a crowd including scientists, engineers, and their families erupted into celebration. They were applauding largely for one satellite on board: MethaneSAT, which is built to detect methane. That's a gas that in the short term packs an even bigger planet-warming punch than carbon dioxide.
MethaneSAT – led by the Environmental Defense Fund – will have a targeted focus: to spot methane from the oil and gas industry, which leaks at various parts of the fossil fuel production process. Sometimes oil companies deliberately burn methane gas if they can't pipe it somewhere.
Reducing methane pollution can help the world meet its climate targets, but for years researchers had little understanding of where exactly methane leaks were coming from. Recent projects have helped give a clearer picture, but the data hasn't always been public, or precise – especially from oil fields, says Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who led the MethaneSAT project.
The goal of MethaneSAT is to have a granular picture of where exactly methane comes from in oil and gas operations around the globe, in places like Texas, Russia and Nigeria. "For the first time [we'll] have high quality empirical data for an entire sector across the globe," Hamburg says.
The oil and gas industry has historically had a culture of confidentiality, says Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, a climate analytics firm. "They like to keep their data private," he says. "There's, I think, a cultural discomfort with the transparency provided by independent monitoring."
When this satellite is fully operational in the coming months, it will provide data that will be free to the public. That will allow governments, researchers and others to have an unbiased view from space of most oil and gas operations, says Adam Brandt, a professor in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University who was not involved with the project.
"The beauty of having MethaneSAT," Brandt says, is "we don't have to ask [oil companies] permission nicely to go on site and make measurements, right?"
The decision to look at oil and gas pollution
About 30% of global warming comes from human-caused methane pollution. Mark Brownstein, a senior vice president at EDF, says the question for a long time was how much methane comes from the oil and gas sector?
Other sectors also create methane pollution. Agriculture – specifically gas-belching cows and gas-emitting manure – is the single biggest source of methane in the U.S., according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
But focusing on the oil and gas sector was strategic, Hamburg says. Oil and gas has a concentrated number of players, with bigger budgets to clean up their operations. "The ability to remediate is much greater and it's cost-effective," he says.
In the past six years EDF put together a team – including scientists from Harvard University and other groups – to build a satellite to get a better picture of the oil industry. The satellite has sensors specifically designed to pick up the fingerprint of the methane molecule. The sensors now orbiting in space will then send data back to Earth in the coming months.
The hope is that regulators will use this data, Hamburg says. "There's interest. There's conversations, not just with the U.S. EPA, but in other governments and other regulators," he says.
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